by Mai Al-Nakib
There weren’t many guarding us, only four or five, and as far as we could tell, we were the only prisoners in the building. It wasn’t a conventional prison, we knew that all along, and when we were released, we weren’t surprised to find that it was the basement of a quite ordinary villa in a suburb of Baghdad. The guards were all men. This caused exactly the kind of trouble you would expect, especially during the first few years and especially for the lovely Khadija, who has two children to show for it. My daughters suspect I lied when I said nothing happened. It isn’t shame that stops me from telling them. We aren’t that kind of family, and I was not – am not – that kind of woman. What stops me from telling them right away is something more complicated than shame or guilt or even regret.
There is no going back. I should have realized this after the occupation, the so-called liberation. Nothing, not a thing, went back to the way it had been. New people in the country, new food, new habits, new language. Suddenly, women swathed in ominous black hoods. One year can blot out the past, everything that we were before – twinkling water, pure desert – and life is channeled into a bucket of mud. No going back. The filth and dirt everywhere, the corruption, the sooted skies and murky seas. Nobody seemed to care, everyone swallowing fistfuls of dollars as fast as they could. We were suspended, watching it all through sandblasted glass, thinking everything was different because she had been taken from us, making it personal. But it wasn’t just her absence, this new and sadly rotting Kuwait. She would have known how to deal with it, we told ourselves, how to make life work despite the doomed tangle. We were, for ten years, in a situation that was unheimlich. We no longer belonged. All we could do was look back and pine for what could never again exist.
Our lives before were padded by her presence. There are people who know how to make life safe despite the deepest sorrows. With a matchbox and Kleenex my mother would fashion baby ghost dolls in a tiny bed for us to play with. And when she and my father had some money, working like demons in their twenties, the early successes of our precious little boomtown, she spent it on travel, on buying beautiful things, on her garden, her house, because she knew it could all disappear, that now was the time to enjoy it. “The thing is to be light as air,” she would say. Our lives before were as light as air. We were lucky. Luck of the draw. The lucky are hated the world over, detested, and rightly so. The lucky make it worse for everyone else. But we have paid our dues. So has she and she didn’t deserve it.
In the trunk of that still Mercedes, when I believed I would be dead in seconds, thoughts of my girls filled me. It felt like being lit from the inside and the fear of death, though undeniably there, diminished. They go on, I go on. Once it became clear none of us was going to be killed – the small number of Kuwaiti POWs kept alive were, apparently, valuable bargaining chips in the endless negotiation for reduced sanctions or increased loans – I knew something had to change. I could not keep filling myself with their light, my children’s or even my husband’s, because it made me want to go home, heimlich, and, as we came to realize after that first year in captivity, there was no chance we were going home any time soon. It wasn’t that I stopped thinking about them completely; that would have been impossible. But what allowed me to create a new kind of home for myself out of the infuriating suspension we now inhabited, a limbo punctuated by the violence and disregard of men whose poverty and desperation could be seen in their bloodshot eyes and crusty yellow nails, was shifting focus from the life I knew to the objects I had once owned. Between my body and me, between the ones I loved and me, a cavalcade of possessions. I can’t expect them to understand any of that yet. How the things that belonged to me – fine lace pieces from Burano, clumps of silver jewelry from Peshawar, my youngest daughter’s old blanket, red clay pots from Lebanon, my father’s dusty books from India, a little packet of playing cards wrapped in the brightest fuchsia tissue paper (which I could never bring myself to unwrap), my mother’s string of delicate pearls floating in gold, her gift to me before she died – each in their way embalmed the kernels of my life.
It has been a month now since her release. She walks through the house in a kind of bubble, touching her objects. She wanders from room to room, opens every cabinet, every drawer, touches the lace covering her mahogany tables, the transparent porcelain teacups, the carved wooden duck. She opens her old copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the one she bought the year I was born, the one in which I had found a black and white photograph of her and my father kissing. Not a kiss others would have been allowed to witness, not the kind of kiss we had always seen them share. This was a private, phantom kiss taken by I don’t know who, maybe just my father’s camera on a tripod. I see her find that lost photograph one morning, watch her breathe out sharply as it falls from the yellowed pages. She is, I think, trying to account for something. I’m not sure what. We’ve all lost our bearings now that she is back. The guilt I feel for putting that into words. Sometimes language should fail. We’ve become ghosts again, like we were the first few years she was gone. In the years since, we built small lives, with guilt, with regret. Does she see it? Now we are suspended again, unable to work, to speak, to think. My father stumbling, trying to make sense of himself with his wife back. She can’t help him yet. He can’t help her either. She stepped off the plane with a burlap sack. Inside her sack: blue and white robe, Greek island sandals. To see her walking through the rooms in her blue and white robe – the same robe, the same sandals – shocks. We can’t make it add up.
I am not defiant. I might wear my intransigence on my sleeve more than before. “The thing is to be as light as air,” I used to say. It’s what I wanted my girls to learn. To enter the interstices of life like air, like a shawl through a rose gold ring. To be present and, at the same time, to wander through the alleys of the past, plucking memories and possibilities like grapes off vines. A scarf, a ring, a string of pearls. An alternative to the inexplicable anxiety that would sometimes grip me in the best of times, would have me shaking for hours in the bathroom where Karim would find me, coax me through. Burlap sack, leather sandals, blue and white robe. Not to ground me or to weigh me down, but the opposite. To set me free, to give me the strength to remember that, in the end, we all die. I will die. My husband will die. My beautiful girls, one by one, will die. The thing is to be as light as air in the meantime. I see the three of them now, gazelles with wide fearful eyes. I sense, too, the steel rod running through them. My indelible mark.
The objects. To find them – in their drawers, cabinets, closets, on tabletops, under beds – is an uncanny delight and a heartbreak. They are more familiar to me than my own body. Seeing them again after a decade means more to me than seeing my family. Sometimes language should fail. I wander through this space that cannot yet feel like home, touching the random oddments that kept me alive. Everything is exactly in its place, like I never left. Who was the dogged monitor of this decade-long precision? Jinan? Ghusoon? Surely not Karim, his legendary absentmindedness an impediment, to say the least. Little Yasmine? All of them, in their way, involved in curating this museum of my belongings. As if they knew all along; as if from afar they were trying, so heroically, to save me. Their lives, like mine, suspended, in spite of marriages and schooling and jobs that pay well. Their broken, damaged lives held together by the painstaking placement of objects that belonged to their lost mother. It takes every speck of self-discipline left not to fall to my knees and wail. The bitterest guilt, a paralyzing regret. To pick up an old book with its dry, saffron pages, to see my name and a date inscribed inside the front cover, from so many, many years ago, is to know with the certainty of a sharp slap that time has betrayed us. My conjured objects, frozen under a forgiving layer of ice, were safe, forever preserved. But in the heat of life, books and lace yellow, vases and porcelain chip, and shawls, even magical ones from Kashmir, are easily perforated by moths. No going back.
From the pages of One Hundred Years, a phantom kiss. Karim and I on our honeymoon on a houseboat in
Kashmir. Beneath our feet, water as blue as the blind eyes of the man who sold us the shawl. It strikes me as tragic that he will never see the tremendous, heart-stopping beauty of his homeland. He laughs as he hands me the shawl, as though mocking my unvoiced pity. Our hunger to see everything in the universe is voracious, and we thank the glittering stars above – so impossibly close, we notice, almost near enough to grab – for our eyes, our ears, our noses, our mouths. On a rock as round and smooth as an egg, Karim and I kiss each other hard, like the world itself depends on it. With our eyes closed and our mouths open, we feel what it means to be young, to believe everything is utterly possible. I hadn’t noticed Karim’s tripod at the time and forgot about that kiss until he showed me the photograph of it months, maybe years, later. I placed it carefully in the pages of my favorite book, never wanting to forget again – in the whirlwind of children and work and habit – the promise of that kiss.
Ten years interned, a litany of objects, but not this photograph. It falls out now, a lifetime later, forgotten thing. In the smoothness of our skin and the white rock under us, I see the old man, his ancient glacier eyes. A promise to love despite war and unrecoverable time. A way home.
Acknowledgements
Thanks, first, to Andy Smart, without whom, no book.
At Bloomsbury, thanks to Kathy Rooney, for her unstinting support; to Sophia Blackwell, whose generosity extended way beyond her role as publicist; and to Erica Jarnes, for her meticulous attentiveness throughout the process. Thanks to Michelle Wallin, editor extraordinaire, ideal reader.
Thanks to Frances and Andy Lench, for throwing open the doors of Chateau Carignan to members of the Bordeaux Writers Workshop every summer since 2008. Thanks to the brilliant women of the Bordeaux Writers Workshop: A. Manette Ansay, Jean Grant, Frances Lench, Martha Payne, Natalia Sarkissian, Laura Schalk, and Lisa Von Trapp. Many of these stories are better for their discernment and care. Special thanks to Manette, for reading and rereading over the years, for her eyes, both sharp and wise, for her encouragement.
Thanks to the island of Sifnos, for keeping alive what in most other places has disappeared forever, and for taking us in. Many of these pages were written there.
To my sisters, Wijdan, Rania (my first reader), and Farah, thank you for reeling in the crazy and for keeping me fundamentally, despite everything, happy.
Thanks to my parents, for their improbable union, their ease in the world, their unwavering love, and for letting us go. This book is dedicated to them.
Finally, thanks to Adeeb, without whom, nothing.
A Note on the Author
Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait in 1970. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University in the US and teaches postcolonial studies and comparative literature at Kuwait University. The Hidden Light of Objects is her first collection of short stories. She lives in Kuwait and is currently writing her first novel.
First published in 2014 by
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
Qatar Foundation
PO Box 5825
Doha
Qatar
www.bqfp.com.qa
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Mai Al-Nakib, 2014
Extract from Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics. © 1973, 2007 by
the estate of Henri Bergson. First published in 1913 by Macmillan and
Co. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
A slightly different version of “Chinese Apples” originally appeared in Ninth Letter.
Reference to “Absolute” in Vignette III. Words and music by Green Gartside. © 1984
by Green Gartside/Scritti Politti. Used by permission of Green Gartside/Scritti Politti © 1984
by Ericton Ltd. Chrysalis Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd.
Reference to “The Word Girl (Flesh and Blood)” in “Bear.” Words and music by David Gamson
and Green Gartside. © 1985 by Green Gartside/Scritti Politti. Used by permission of Green Gartside/Scritti Politti
© 1985 by Jouissance Publishing Ltd. Chryssalis Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd © 1985 by WB Music Corp (ASCAP),
Gamson Songs (ASACP) and Jouissance Publishing (ASCAP). All rights on behalf of itself
and Gamson Songs. Administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved.
The poem “The Passage” from The Pages of Night and Day by Adonis. English translation
copyright © 1994 by Samuel Hazo. First published by the Marlboro Press, Marlboro,
Vermont. Northwestern University paperback published 2000. All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
eISBN 9789927101144
Cover by Holly Macdonald
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To find out more about our authors and their books please visit
www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews
and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest
releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletters here.
